Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts

This timely collection considers the uneasy but productive relationship between genres of horror and history. The essays throughout consider multiple ways that horror might shape historical awareness and popular understanding of the past. Horror narratives are means for a society to engage with deep trauma, or to express ongoing pain and suffering as related to historical events. From Zombies to witches, across TV and film, and from the USA to Japan to Serbia, these thoughtful interventions allow us to understand the multiple and complex ways that horror tropes create, challenge, and interrogate historical narratives and authority. * Jerome de Groot, Professor of Literature and Culture, University of Manchester, UK * From the historical traumas that scar us to the entities that scare us, Amanda Howell and Stephanie Green’s Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts explores the intersections between our pasts and our present, evidencing William Faulkner’s observation that history is “never dead. Its not even past.” * Jay McRoy, Professor, University of Wisconsin–Parkside, USA * While horror relies on fight or flight responses to actual or imagined threats, as Howell and Green remind us, this kind of viewing is less about being ‘in the moment’, and more about being drawn and quartered by history. Each chapter reminds us how the genre, like nightmares, amplifies the atemporality of suffering. Whether spun through the metaphor of Penny Dreadful’s monsters, the taking of an Aboriginal child’s wonder and magic, the sexual aberrations of the ostracized, or homicidal inbred clans marked by deprivation, Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts eloquently dissects the undead nature of collective trauma. * Terrie Waddell, Adjunct Associate Professor, La Trobe University, Australia *